Success Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is doing what he did best: turning a personal aesthetic into a moral argument. On the surface, this is advice about better products. Underneath, it’s a quiet indictment of an industry that confuses technical fluency with insight. “Dots to connect” flatters the listener with the promise of genius while smuggling in a demand: go live. Read outside your field, travel, get embarrassed, learn taste the hard way. Otherwise you’ll ship “linear solutions” - not wrong, just narrow, predictable, and spiritually overfit to the worldview of the people building them.

The phrasing is classic Jobs: deceptively plain, almost folksy, but strategically hierarchical. “Our industry” creates an insider circle; “haven’t had very diverse experiences” draws a boundary inside it between the merely competent and the truly visionary. The real target isn’t diversity as a slogan, but diversity as raw material for intuition - the kind of cross-disciplinary pattern recognition Apple marketed as magic.

Context matters. This comes from a period when Silicon Valley was hardening into a monoculture of engineering-first problem solving, treating users as edge cases to be optimized. Jobs is arguing for design as anthropology: products should be shaped by a broad “understanding of the human experience,” not just specs. It’s also a self-justification. His own mythos - calligraphy classes, Buddhism, music, fonts - becomes evidence for why Apple’s choices felt inevitable after the fact.

There’s an unresolved tension, too: Jobs’s “human experience” is expansive, but filtered through one man’s curatorial control. The line is both a plea for wider horizons and a defense of taste as authority.